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Google uses 200+ ranking factors and dwell time is one of those factors. Or is it?

The truth is, dwell time is a confusing and misunderstood metric.

I mean, what is dwell time? How is it measured? Is it REALLY a ranking factor? And if so, how the heck do you optimize for it?

In this post, I’ll be answering all of these questions and more.

I also reached out to some of the biggest names in the SEO industry to get their take on the matter.

Let’s get started!

Sidenote.

This post was originally published in 2016. But we gave it a MAJOR update in January 2018 to make it up-to-date. So don’t be surprised to see some old comments. They contribute to the topic and we could not just delete them.

What is Dwell Time?

Dwell time is the amount of time that passes between the moment you click a search result and subsequently return back to the SERPs.

Example:

Let’s assume I do a search for “white hat link building.”

I click the first result and spend a few minutes (5 minutes 14 seconds, to be exact) reading the content.

Because I have a somewhat unhealthy obsession with learning, I decide I want to know even more. So, I head back to the SERPs (via the “back” button in my browser) to look for more content.

Sidenote.

This back and forth process between the SERPs and search results is also known as pogo-sticking.

My dwell time on that page, then, was roughly 5 minutes 14 seconds.

But why does this matter for SEO?

A Brief History of Dwell Time

[…] The time between when a user clicks on our search result and when they come back from your website tells a potential story. A minute or two is good as it can easily indicate the visitor consumed your content. Less than a couple of seconds can be viewed as a poor result.

Duane Forrester,Senior Project Manager for Bing

But still, why does this really matter to search engines?

Here’s what Duane said:

Your goal should be that when a visitor lands on your page, the content answers all of their needs, encouraging their next action to remain with you. If your content does not encourage them to remain with you, they will leave. The search engines can get a sense of this by watching the dwell time.

Duane Forrester,Senior Project Manager for Bing

OK. Makes sense.

He’s basically saying that the longer someone stays on your website after coming from the SERPs, the more likely it is that they found your content useful.

Here are a few dwell time examples and how they may be interpreted:

2 second dwell time: I didn’t find what I wanted/expected on your site. So, I quickly went back to the SERP to find something better.

2 minute dwell time: I found your content pretty useful and stuck around a couple of minutes to read it.

15 minute dwell time: I found your content super-useful and was heavily-invested in what you had to say.

So, it’s not too far-fetched to suggest that search engines could be using dwell time as a ranking factor. I mean, it definitely seems like a good way to judge the quality and relevancy of a given result, right?

I’ll talk more about dwell time as a ranking factor later in this guide but first, let’s clear something up…

Dwell Time vs. Bounce Rate vs. Time on Page: What’s the Difference?

If there’s one word that embodies these 3 metrics as a whole, it’s this:

Confusion.

In fact, I’ve seen SEOs use these 3 metrics interchangeably on many occasions.

These 3 metrics are not interchangeable.

Here’s what each of these metrics mean (in plain English):

Dwell time: the amount of time that passes between the moment a user clicks a search result and subsequently returns back to the SERPs.

Bounce rate: the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. visitors who only visit one page on your website before leaving). These people may have returned to the SERPs or simply closed the page. It doesn’t matter which. It also makes no difference whether they stuck around for 2 seconds or 2 hours, it’s still a “bounce”.

Time on page: the amount of time a visitor spent on your page before going anywhere else. This could be back to the SERPs, to another page on your website, to a bookmarked page—anywhere.

It’s also worth noting that time on page and bounce rate are viewable in Google Analytics:

You won’t find any such metric for dwell time.

If Google does use any form of dwell time metric as ranking factor, they aren’t sharing this fact (or any of the data) with us.

Is Dwell Time a Google Ranking Factor?

Right now, there’s no official statement from Google on whether dwell time> is, or isn’t, a ranking factor.

But, in late-2017, the head of Google Brain, Nick Frost, said this at a conference:

Google is now integrating machine learning into [the process of figuring out what the relationship between a search and the best page for that search is]. So then training models on when someone clicks on a page and stays on that page, when they go back or when they and trying to figure out exactly on that relationship.

Nick Frost,Head of Google Brain

Yes, this appears to confirm the notion that dwell time is a ranking factor.

So if you rank on page two (or beyond), almost nobody will be “dwelling” on your page…not even for second.

This means that dwell time would only kick-in as a (possible) ranking factor for results in the top 10.

Bottomline? Unless you’re already on the first page, don’t worry about optimizing for dwell time. Your time is better spent optimizing for other (more important) factors that will get you into the top 10.

But, for those who are on the first page already, here are 3 reasons why dwell time may make sense as a ranking factor:

It’s a Good Indicator of Relevance (User Intent)

Let’s take the search term “paleo diet for beginners”.

Anyone searching for this is clearly a paleo newbie. They’re looking for a beginner’s guide.

It covers almost everything you could ever want to know about the paleo diet on a single page. It’s also well-written and well-presented.

Basically, it fulfills searcher intent perfectly.

Most people would surely spend 15+ minutes reading this before (maybe) returning to the SERPs.

In contrast, let’s take a look at this page (ranking #6 for the same query, at the time of writing).

It doesn’t take long to realise that this is nowhere near as high-quality as the guide from NerdFitness.

Here are a few issues:

Content is pretty thin at roughly 500 words;

Information is very basic;

It’s plastered with ads.

Because of this, I estimate that the average dwell time for this page below 30 seconds.

Bottomline: dwell time appears to be a good indicator of the relevance and quality of a given result.

It (Potentially) Trumps Bounce Rate as a Ranking Signal

Bounce rate is pretty sketchy as a “ranking signal”, to say the least.

This is because people can “bounce” for any number of reasons, such as:

No need to visit >1 pages — everything they needed was on one page;

Idle for 30+ minutes — this triggers a new session in Google Analytics;

Poor content — they didn’t like it, so they left.

This makes it difficult to discern good and bad experiences, and/or if a page fulfills searcher intent by looking at bounce rate alone.

To illustrate this, let’s go back to our previous example (the “paleo” one).

Both page visits were technically bounces. But, the experience was very different for each site (i.e. good on one, poor on the other).

Here’s how these two visits appear in Google Analytics:

A 15+ minute visit to NerdFitness:

And here’s a <30-second visit to FitnessMagazine.com:

Not only do these two (in reality, very different) visits appear identical, they also both state time on page of zero seconds.

Clearly, this isn’t true. So what’s going on here?

In order for GA to calculate the time on page, it needs two clicks: an entrance click and an exit click. If there’s no exit click (e.g. the user clicking through to another page on your website), GA can’t make a calculation.

For sessions where the user only looked at one page (a “bounce”), the Time on Page and the Session Duration is 0. This isn’t because Google knows they left right away — it is because they didn’t have any indication of when the user left so they couldn’t calculate the Time on Page, and they consider the lack of a value means 0.

They go on to say:

It [“time on page”] could have been 10 seconds or 10 minutes; they don’t know, so they say 0. Did the user read your web page? They don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. All we know is that they didn’t look at another page on your site within the next 30 minutes (that’s how long a default session lasts).

And here’s another big issue with using bounce rate as a ranking factor: Google would need to mine Google Analytics data to do so.

There’s no other way to discern the bounce rate of a page.

But, Google’s official stance is that they don’t use any GA data in the algorithm.

So, by Google’s own admission, bounce rate is not a ranking factor.

Now, it’s never a good idea to take everything Google says as gospel. But, in this instance, they’re most likely telling the truth.

Here’s are 3 reasons why:

Not everyone uses GA: In 2012, an estimated 10+ million websites had Google Analytics installed. Even if this number has grown tenfold since then (it probably hasn’t), that still leaves only 10% of all websites with GA installed. Would Google really be able to decipher anything of true value from analysing bounce rate on just 1/10th of the world’s websites? Maybe, but I suspect the data would be mostly useless;

GA is often incorrectly installed: Anyone who’s ever done an SEO audit will know how important it is to check that GA isn’t mis-installed. This is a common issue and it can often cause bounce rates to be inflated. This would be inaccurate data for Google;

So, even if Google was secretly analysing bounce rate data from GA, chances are it wouldn’t be of much value.

This is why dwell time (potentially) trumps bounce rate as a ranking signal — dwell time data is easier to collect, especially for Google.

Here’s why:

Let’s assume you Google “iPhone 8 review”.

If/when you click a result, Google could start a kind-of virtual stopwatch. And when you return back to the SERPs, they would stop it.

Now they know exactly how long you spent on that site (i.e. your dwell time).

And if you’re wondering how Google will know when you return to the search results?”, here are two ideas:

Chrome browser data: According to the latest figures from W3Schools, 72.4% of people now use Chrome. Chrome is Google’s own browser, so they probably know when you click the “back” button and return to the SERPs.

“Next click” analysis: If you go back to the SERPs, it’ll probably only be a couple seconds before you click-through to another result. Google could wait for this click and thus, decipher a rough dwell time for your previous click.

It’s clear, then, that with a bit of data mining, Google could uncover some useful data from analysing dwell time.

It’s Something Google Is Actively Tracking…RIGHTNOW!

Do this:

Open Safari on your iPhone and Google the phrase “link building strategies.”

Hit this result from Moz (it should be in the top 3):

Wait for the page to fully-load, then hit the back button.

Notice anything?

Google has now added a scrollable list of related searches under the result you clicked.

Sidenote.

If this doesn’t work for you, try clicking another result on the first page — it seems to work with most. Also, I only tried this on my iPhone, so I have no clue if it works on Android devices.

This makes sense. You returned to the search results, which likely means you didn’t find what you were looking for.

There are many scenarios where SHORTER dwell time is an indication of quality. For example, anytime someone is looking for a quick piece of reference information, such as a zip code or phone number for a business. For informational searches like these, you want to design your pages, so users find what they want pretty much immediately.

I clicked through to the included Google Sheets template (which opened in a new tab, so I never left the SEER website), made a copy, and tried it out.

But, after a couple of minutes, I realised the spreadsheet no longer worked and was giving an error.

So, I went back to the SEER tab (I never closed this) checked the comments to see if others were having the same issue.

They were.

I then returned to the SERPs to continue my search.

So, although my dwell time here was high (5+ minutes), my experience was still a negative one.

The page didn’t fulfill my needs and, honestly, doesn’t deserve to rank in the top 10 until it’s fixed.

It Doesn’t Work Well for “Shopping” Queries

Here’s an interesting point Mark Traphagen made in a comment on the original version of this post:

One more scenario in which dwell time might be a false flag for content quality and user satisfaction: shopping. Often when I’m shopping, I may click back and forth rather rapidly among multiple results because I’m just at a stage where I’m comparison shopping, maybe for price or certain features.

Should You Be Trying to Improve Dwell Time? (And If so, How?)

Do this and you won’t have to worry about improving dwell time — it’ll take care of itself.

I reached out to Danny Sullivan (founder of Search Engine Land) to ask his opinion on all this.

Here’s what he had to say:

I think Google probably tries to measure and use engagement as part of its ranking algorithm. I think precisely how it does this isn’t known, I think too many SEOs obsess that it must be clickthrough rate. It largely doesn’t matter. As marketers, you want people engaging with your content first and foremost. So focus on that, and you’ll probably align with what Google wants

1. Create BETTER Content…Somewhere Between 2X and 10X

Pretty obvious, right?

But, this doesn’t always mean creating longer content. Sometimes the most deserving result for the #1 spot is the most succinct piece.

Here is Eric’s take:

I bet if you ran an experiment to measure the average dwell time on millions of websites and their ranking positions in the SERPs that you would see a strong correlation between dwell time and ranking. Does that mean that I think dwell time is a ranking factor? NO. It just means that there are more searches where a long dwell time means a user is happy than there are searches where a short dwell time does. There are also likely many searches where dwell time is irrelevant as a measure of quality too.

2. Target the RIGHT Keywords (and DON’T “Clickbait”)

Let’s assume that I wrote a blog post entitled “the advanced guide to SEO.”

Here’s how it may look in the SERPs:

Pretty relevant and clickable result, right?

Not so fast, because in this post I talk about things like:

Adding keywords to title tags and meta descriptions;

Directory link building;

Etc.

So, not advanced at all, really…

This is a prime example of targeting the wrong keyword.

Something like “learn SEO” or “SEO for beginners” would be a better fit for this piece.

As it stands, the content doesn’t fulfill its promise — the advice is basic, not advanced.

Because of this, most users will quickly head back to the SERPs in search of a more relevant result.

Here’s what Eric had to say on the matter:

In the long run, what Google wants to see is who are the types of people that represent the very best match for your site. It’s obvious who those are – your prospects. Serve them extremely well, and you align your goals and those of Google in the best way possible.

If this happens, they won’t ever see or engage with your content, and dwell time will be zero.

Here are a few other common UX issues to keep in mind:

Layout: Your website’s layout should prioritise your content and ensure easy digestion. Remember, people only only ever one click away from thousands of other results. They aren’t going to read your post if it’s written in yellow Comic Sans on a white background, no matter how good it is.

Design: Ugly websites rarely instil a sense of confidence that leads the user to stick around for very long. So, make sure your design resonates with and appeals to your target audience.

Mobile-optimization: Many websites still aren’t optimized for smaller screens, even in 2018. 9 times out of 10, this is another instant “back” button situation for me (so, dwell time is close to zero). So, even if you’re pretty sure that your website is mobile-optimized, do me a favour and double-check.

Pageless scrolling: Implementing pageless scrolling works wonders for websites with a lot of multi-page content. Why? Because the easier it is to continue digesting content, the more chance there is that people will do so. For example, look at Facebook/Twitter. How many times have you sat scrolling through their seemingly never-ending news feeds?